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Updated: June 6, 2025
'I'm rather reducing myself to half batta in tobacco. I've thoughts of marrying. 'Don't do that. 'Why? It's not wrong. 'No, perhaps not; but it's stupid. 'Come now, old fellow, life out there in the tropics is not so jolly all alone!
In the country of Manna, southward of Bencoolen, a progress in the art of cultivation is discovered, superior to what appears in almost any other part of the island; the Batta country perhaps alone excepted. Here may be seen pieces of land in size from five to fifteen acres, regularly ploughed and harrowed. The difference is thus accounted for.
Leyden, in his Dissertation on the Languages and Literature of the Indo-Chinese nations, says that the Batta character is written neither from right to left, nor from left to right, nor from top to bottom, but in a manner directly opposite to that of the Chinese, from the bottom to the top of the line, and that I have conveyed an erroneous idea of their natural form by arranging the characters horizontally instead of placing them in a perpendicular line.
The men had found food and rest in the Army, and now they were going to fight "niggers" people who ran away if you shook a stick at them. Wherefore they cheered lustily when the rumour ran, and the shrewd, clerkly non-commissioned officers speculated on the chances of batta and of saving their pay. At Headquarters men said: "The Fore and Fit have never been under fire within the last generation.
A native of the island of Nias, who had stabbed a Batta man in a fit of frenzy at Batang-tara river, near Tappanuli bay, and endeavoured to make his escape, was, upon the alarm being given, seized at six in the morning, and before eleven, without any judicial process, was tied to a stake, cut in pieces with the utmost eagerness while yet alive, and eaten upon the spot, partly broiled, but mostly raw.
Then doubling a point of leek-green grass, based upon comparatively poor soil, sand, and clay, and backed by noble trees, we entered the Mbata River, the Toutiay of the chart and the Batta Creek of M. du Chaillu's map. It comes from the south-west, and it heads much nearer the coast than is shown on paper.
My informants considered that there could be no less than fifty or sixty men eaten in a year, and this in times of peace; but they were unable to estimate the true extent, considering the great population of the country; they were confident, however, that these laws were strictly enforced wherever the name of Batta was known, and that it was only in the immediate vicinity of our settlements that they were modified and neglected.
This is to keep open to us the faculty of interfering if we please. The Duke thinks my letter does not signify one pin. The simile of the elephants evidently means no more than that an indiscreet judge was placed between two discreet ones. The Duke told me he had offered a Lordship of the Treasury to Ashley, who had declined it. He then told him to make himself master of the Batta question.
The voyages of our late famous circumnavigators, the veracity of whose assertions is unimpeachable, have already proved to the world that human flesh is eaten by the savages of New Zealand; and I can with equal confidence, from conviction of the truth, though not with equal weight of authority, assert that it is also, in these days, eaten in the island of Sumatra by the Batta people, and by them only.
In Rome, however, he was so well received that he stayed there four years, and Italianized himself to an extent that may be seen in a picture in the Wallace Collection, a Coast Scene with Classic Ruins, which he signs Gio. Batta. Weenix. Though he returned to Holland and settled near Utrecht, his manner was sensibly modified by his sojourn in Rome.
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